bpmtk | Search Results | Didier Stevens

Thursday 19 November 2009

Update: bpmtk with hook-createprocess.dll

Filed under: bpmtk,Hacking,My Software,PDF,Update — Didier Stevens @ 19:32

There are no real changes in this new version of bpmtk, only a new DLL (hook-createprocess.dll) was added. You can use this DLL to protect your Windows machine from getting infected by the current malicious documents found in-the-wild.

You can download bpmtk version 0.1.6.0 here.

Hook-createprocess.dll is a DLL that patches the process into which it is loaded to prevent it from creating new processes. It does this by patching the Import Address Table of kernel32.dll for ntdll.dll to hook API functions NtCreateProcessEx, NtCreateProcess and NtCreateUserProcess.
Calls to these functions are intercepted and not passed on to the original functions. Instead, a code is returned indicating that the operation was blocked. The result is that functions in kernel32 used to create new processes fail (like WinExec) and hence that the patched process can’t create new processes.
This is all it takes to block most shellcode found in malicious documents like PDF malware. Shellcode like this does the following:

Of course, since this protective measure is taken by patching the process, shellcode could undo this patching and bypass our protection. Or it could use the ntdll API and not be hindered by our patch. But actual malware found in-the-wild doesn’t do this (not talking about targeted attacks) and is thus prevented from executing the trojan it just downloaded or extracted from the PDF document.

If you want better protection, you’ll have to use something that works at the level of the kernel, like sandboxing software.

However, this patch comes with some drawbacks, because it also blocks bening new processes. For example, the update function of Adobe Acrobat requires the creation of a new process. To reenable the creation of processes, you have to unload hook-createprocess.dll (unloading removes the hooks). bpmtk has a function to unload DLLs from a process (reject).

There are a couple of trick to load this DLL with the program you want to protect. I’ll describe a generic method in an upcoming post, but now I want to explain it for a specific program.
Programs have a list of DLLs they need for their execution. We will use a PE-file editor to add our hook-createprocess.dll to this list. hook-createprocess.dll exports a dummy function (_Dummy) just so you can add to the imports table of an executable. We will use LordPE to add hook-createprocess.dll with _Dummy to Adobe Reader:

Right-click the Import table:

And don’t forget to save…

Comments (8)

Thursday 25 June 2009

bpmtk: Injecting VBScript

Filed under: bpmtk,Hacking,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 7:03

Here’s a new trick: injecting VBScript in a process. I’ve developed a DLL that will create a COM instance of the VBScripting engine and let it execute a VBScript. Injecting this DLL in a running program results in execution of the VBScript in the context of the running program. Here’s an example where I wrote a VBScript to search and replace a string in the memory of the notepad process:

Here is part of the VBScript I developed to search and replace inside the memory of a process. It uses custom methods like Peek, Poke and Output that I’ve added to the scripting engine:

20090609-205420

I’ll provide more details in an upcoming blogpost on bpmtk version 0.1.5.0, but you can already download it here.

YouTube, Vimeo and hires Xvid.

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Tuesday 9 December 2008

Updates: bpmtk and Hakin9; PDF and Metasploit

Filed under: Announcement,Hacking,Malware,My Software,PDF,Update — Didier Stevens @ 21:23

Hakin9 has published my bpmtk article. The article mentions bpmtk version 0.1.4.0; however, this new version has no new features. But it comes with extra PoC code, like a LUA-mode keylogger and “rootkit”. New blogposts will explain this new PoC code.

bpmtk12

And upcoming bpmtk version 0.1.5.0 contains a new feature to inject shellcode. Just have to update the documentation.

On the PDF front: I’ve produced my first Ruby code ;-). I worked together with MC from Metasploit to optimize the PDF generation code in this util.printf exploit module. It uses some obfuscation techniques I described 8 months ago.

Comments (9)

Thursday 3 July 2008

bpmtk: A New Version With bpmtk.dll Included

Filed under: Hacking,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 8:41

Here is a new version of the Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit (bpmtk).

Some noteworthy changes:

bpmtk.dll has been added
for ASCII: and UNICODE:, now you can specify a string with spaces by enclosing it in double quotes (ASCII:”My Name”)
write and search-and-write use VirtualProtectEx to change the virtual page protection when a write fails

So now you can also load the bpmtk as a DLL in a process and it will execute its configuration. The configuration is embedded in the DLL as an ASCII string. To change the configuration, you’ve 2 options:

edit the source code and recompile the DLL
binary edit bpmtk.dll and insert your config between the strings #BPMTK_CONFIG_BEGIN\r\n and #BPMTK_CONFIG_END\r\n. Terminate all lines of your config with CRLF

Wednesday 25 June 2008

bpmtk: Bypassing SRP with DLL Restrictions

Filed under: Hacking,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 6:51

In my last bpmtk post, I argued that although whitelisting DLLs (supplementary to whitelisting EXEs) prevents my Excel macro from loading the embedded DLL, it would be far too difficult to build and maintain such a whitelist of DLLs. However, Cd-MaN commented with a technique to add DLL restrictions to the Software Restriction Policies without building an exhaustive DLL whitelist, the details are in his excellent blogpost (step 3).

In a nutshell, Cd-MaN configures SRP to restrict allowed DLLs to those found in the Windows and Programs Files directories (a restricted user is not allowed to write to these directories).

To bypass this SRP configuration with my Excel macro, I had to update it so that it would perform the process manipulation directly, in stead of doing this manipulation from within the embedded DLL. And here his how I did it:

The trick is to call WriteProcessMemory directly from within the script to disable SRP. Because I didn’t want to recode my search-and-write function from C to VBscript, I hardcoded the addresses to write to (this will only work for the specified version of advapi32.dll). The effect of these 2 WriteProcessMemory calls is to patch advapi32.dll inside the Excel process, thereby disabling SRP so that the embedded DLL is allowed to load (of course, now that SRP is disabled for Excel, I can also just start another program).

A new version of my bpmtk utility (with the DLL version of bpmtk.exe) will be posted soon.

Comments (4)

Thursday 5 June 2008

bpmtk: How About SRP Whitelists?

Filed under: Hacking,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 13:44

After having showed you how my Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit can be used to bypass Software Restriction Policies, I wanted to follow this with a post showing how SRP whitelisting can prevent this. However, while preparing this new post, I got an idea how I could bypass SRP whitelists (under certain conditions), but I’ve no idea how to prevent this. I finally decided to post this without a solution, maybe you’ll come up with one.

With a SRP whitelist, starting a program is denied by default:

As an administrator, you’ve to explicitly specify the programs that are allowed to be executed by your users (if there are many programs, maintaining this whitelist becomes time consuming). Because of this whitelist, tools like gpdisable or bpmtk can’t be executed to disable SRP. However, if I can execute these tools without starting a new process, SRP will not block them …
Applications with embedded scripting can also be used to manipulate processes. For example, the scripting features of Microsoft Office allow you to call the system APIs I’ve been using in my bpmtk. It’s often not easy (even impossible) to convert a C program to VBscript, but I’ve a workaround.

First, we adapt our C program from an EXE to a DLL (entrypoint DllMain in stead of main), because VBscript can load a DLL.

We’ll use Excel’s scripting features. I’ve created an Excel spreadsheet that embeds a DLL that can be executed with a mouse-click:

The MyDLL dialog is displayed by the embedded DLL.

The DoIt button starts this Sub:

DoIt will create a temporary file (in the user’s temporary file folder), write the embedded DLL to it (DumpFile), and then load the DLL (LoadLibrary).

Generating the temporary filename:

Writing the embedded DLL to the temporary file:

Each DumpFileX sub writes bytes to the temporary file (the DLL is embedded in these subs by including the hex dump in strings). It’s necessary to split this over several subs, because of the sub size limitation.

Once the DLL is stored in the temporary file, we call LoadLibrary to load our library in the Excel process. And this executes our code inside the Excel process. Because of this, SRP will not deny it, and our code can disable SRP.

Creating temporary files and loading libraries is normal behavior for programs, SRP will not block this. Even most HIPS will not block this, because loading a library is not the same as injecting a DLL (injecting a DLL is loading a library inside another process). The only thing that might be considered abnormal by the HIPS, is that a temporary file is mapped into memory, but there are also legitimate programs that do this.

SRP has an option to whitelist DLLs, but then you’re facing the huge task of identifying and specifying all DLLs your programs use!

If you implement a SRP whitelist because you absolutely want to control the programs executed by your users, take some time to reflect on your users and the scripting capabilities of your whitelisted applications. And if you really have to prevent the technique I show here, you’ll have to find another solution than SRP whitelists. Unfortunately, I’ve not found one yet… If you’ve an idea, post a comment (banning applications with embedded scripting or disabling scripting is not an option).

Comments (16)

Tuesday 3 June 2008

Quickpost: bpmtk Config File Embedding

Filed under: Hacking,My Software,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 5:59

After a rather long detour in PDF file format land, let’s pick up where we left the bpmtk.

My Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit requires a configuration file with instructions to manipulate processes, like this one to start cmd.exe in a restricted environment:

start cmd.exe
search-and-write module:. unicode:DisableCMD hex:41

Save this configuration in a text file, for example start-cmd.txt. And then start bpmtk with this file:

bpmtk start-cmd.txt

You can also embed this configuration file inside the bpmtk executable, like this:

bpmtk start-cmd.txt bpmtk-cmd.exe

This will create a copy of bpmtk.exe, called bpmtk-cmd.exe, with start-cmd.txt embedded as a resource (called BPMTK).
When you execute bpmtk-cmd.exe (without any arguments), the embedded script will be executed. Use this
trick if you often have to execute the same command, or if you have to execute bpmtk in an environment where you cannot provide an argument.

Quickpost info

Wednesday 19 March 2008

bpmtk: Spying on IE

Filed under: Hacking,My Software — Didier Stevens @ 11:07

I was asked if it’s possible to intercept IE’s HTTPS requests. It is, it’s not difficult, and you don’t need admin rights to do it on your own processes. In other words, a malware doesn’t even need admin rights to spy on your IE process, if said malware is also running under your user account.

We need to hook the API calls to WinINet functions, like HTTPOpenRequest. We can do this by patching the Delayed Import Address Table of executables calling WinINet functions. In our case, to spy on IE, we need to patch the DIAT of urlmon.dll. One simple way to hook these API calls, is to develop a DLL that will patch the DIAT, diverting the calls to our own functions. Our functions will just call the original functions while intercepting the data.

Here is an example for HTTPOpenRequest:

HookHTTPOpenRequestA is our hook function for HTTPOpenRequest. It will just output the flags, verb and objectname parameters to the debugger, and then call the original HTTPOpenRequest function with unmodified arguments (which we saved in variable OriginalHTTPOpenRequestA). BTW, if the declaration and use of OriginalHTTPOpenRequestA looks confusing to you, read the explanation of function pointers in C.

Patching the DIAT is easy, use the PatchDIAT function that I provide with my Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit (it’s in iat.c).

PatchDIAT needs the name of the executable we want to patch (urlmon.dll), the name of the API to patch (wininet.dll), the name of the function to patch (HttpOpenRequestA), the address of our hooking function (HookHttpOpenRequestA) and a variable to store the address of the original function (OriginalHttpOpenRequestA). PatchDIAT returns S_OK when patching was successful.

We package everything in a DLL, while hooking some other functions, like InternetReadFile (to intercept actual data), and then inject this DLL in IE with my toolkit:

I’ve stored a test file on my server: https://DidierStevens.com/files/temp/test.txt. When you browse to this test file with the patched IE, you’ll see this in Sysinternal’s DebugView:

Lines 0 to 4 indicate the patching IE was successful.

Line 5 shows IE opening a connection to didierstevens.com on port 443 (that’s 1BB in hexadecimal).

Line 6 shows the preparation of an HTTPS GET request to file /files/temp/test.txt. Flags 00C00000 indicate HTTPS and keep-alive.

Line 7 shows that the call to InternetReadFile was successful and read 25 bytes (0x19).

Line 8 shows the actual data retrieved by IE: This is just a text file.

The next lines indicate we unloaded our DLL with success (thus undoing the patch).

As you can see, we can intercept data before it is encrypted by the HTTPS connection (/files/temp/test.txt) and after it is decrypted (This is just a text file.). This works because we patch the executable before it calls API functions that handle the encryption/decryption, so we get access to the unencrypted data.

I kept my demo DLL very simple to show you the basic principles. A complete spying program would have to hook more functions and tie all the data together to present it in a user friendly way.

It’s also simple to adapt my IE spying DLL to tamper with the data. For example, it could redirect IE to another web site by changing the lpszServerName argument before it calls the original InternetConnect function.

Comments (29)

Wednesday 12 March 2008

bpmtk: DisableAMD

Filed under: Hacking,My Software,Reverse Engineering — Didier Stevens @ 0:43

Remember my DisableAMD post? In stead of patching the EXE file, you can also use my Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit to patch the running process.

There is a small difficulty, however. The check for the DisableCMD key is done when CMD.EXE is started, so to be successful, we have to start the program and change the DisableCMD string in memory before the check is made. Sounds impossible? Not really, the CreateProcess function allows you to create a new process with its main thread in a suspended state (this means that the program is not running). This gives you the opportunity to change the string in memory before it is used.

Use the start statement to start a new process in suspended state:

start cmd.exe

Change the string in memory:

search-and-write module:. unicode:DisableCMD unicode:DisableAMD

The main thread will be resumed after the last statement was executed (search-and-write in our example):

The cmd.exe window in the background was launched from the start menu (showing you that cmd.exe is disabled), while the cmd.exe window in the foreground was launched with the bpmtk (showing you the bypass of the GPO).

And did you notice that this screenshot is taken on a Windows 2008 server?

Next time, I’ll show some tricks to use the bpmtk in a restricted environment, like a Terminal Server.

Comments (4)

Thursday 6 March 2008

bpmtk: Replacing Gpdisable

Filed under: Hacking,My Software,Reverse Engineering — Didier Stevens @ 8:52

Gpdisable is a tool to bypass group policy as a limited user, posted by Marc Russinovich on his blog when he was still the owner of Sysinternals. But now that Sysinternals is owned by Microsoft, the tool is not available anymore.

My Basic Process Manipulation Tool Kit can replace Gpdisable, I’ll show how and give you one more trick.

LikeMarc did, you can inject a DLL that will patch the IAT to subvert NtQueryValueKey, but I’ll leave this technique for an upcoming post.

My example doesn’t require you to program a DLL to inject: since we want to hide the TransparentEnabled registry key, we will just rename the key in the process memory of the programs that impose Software Restriction Policies on us (like explorer.exe). Here is the bpmtk config file to achieve this goal:

dll-name advapi32.dll
#rename TransparentEnabled to AransparentEnabled
search-and-write module:. unicode:TransparentEnabled ascii:A

This will patch each process you’ve rights to and who has loaded advapi32.dll (this DLL enforces SRP).

But as Mark writes in his blog, this will not work for running processes because they have already cached the value of TransparentEnabled and are thus not querying the registry anymore. This is why many people reported that Gpdisable didn’t work for them. Gpupdate /force will force a refresh of the policies, and invalidate the cache.

But if you’re in a restricted environment, there’s a chance you’re prevented from doing a gpupdate. Here’s another way: set the variable _g_bInitializedFirstTime to 0, this will also invalidate the cache. For advapi32.dll version 5.1.2600.2180, this variable is at address 77E463C8. Our script becomes:

dll-name advapi32.dll
#rename TransparentEnabled to AransparentEnabled
search-and-write module:. unicode:TransparentEnabled ascii:A
write version:5.1.2600.2180 hex:77E463C8 hex:00

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Didier Stevens